This Love Is Not for Cowards (27 page)

“You see what I was telling you, Robert? It's not all violence here.”

Of all the weddings I've been to, this is the best by far. As a night out, it beats even
lucha libre
with Fussion and the gang from El Kartel. This is family. It's life.
Mexicans are a happy people.
There is a terrific energy here. I feel substantially more alive just by witnessing it all, by sharing this night with Marco and Dany and their families and my friends. The Indios players take over the dance floor, pulling Marco into the center of their pack.

Right now, in this city, a bride mourns the murder of the man she was married to for only five minutes. That happened here. In Juárez. Same Catholic religion. Same holy sacrament Dany and Marco shared with us this afternoon. Is it luck no bullets have found us? Providence? Earlier tonight, after Edwin poured me a shot of that superfine tequila, one of Dany's uncles pulled me aside in the house. He told me I'm crazy to be living in Juárez. He has no choice anymore, he said—he
cautioned.
His family is here. His work is here. But since
I
don't have to be here, it'd be insane for me to stay.

“In Juárez you can be a good person and the violence comes to you,” he warned.

The Indios players hoist Marco into the air. I'm told this is another of the traditions. He falls back into their arms and they toss him again, up into the cold night. His legs go akimbo. Even above the cheers of his teammates and his family I can hear him laugh. He's not coming back, I think to myself, and what I mean is to the United States. His house is here. Now his family is here, too, and so is his work; he's still under contract with the Indios, and the last anyone heard from Francisco Ibarra, the team isn't going anywhere. Marco made all these choices with his eyes open, and on a night like this I can understand why. He's staying in Mexico. He's staying in Juárez.

MAYBE IT
IS
providence.

Marco and Dany honeymoon in Europe. Five cities in fifteen days, a whirlwind so exhausting they fall asleep in public at one point, on the steps outside a church, their heads resting on each other's shoulders. Marco had proposed a gambling junket to Las Vegas, but Dany put her foot down. This, she said, is the time in life to think big. So it's Spain first, just so Marco can tour Santiago Bernabéu, the home stadium of Real Madrid. From there a boat to Athens for one day and one night. Then to Rome, to toss one coin each in the Trevi Fountain, and up to Venice for not much longer than a gondola ride. In Paris, Marco insists they case the entire Louvre in an afternoon, warning Dany to keep up because he has the money and the passports and she doesn't have a phone. Paris, they discover, is expensive. Four beers cost sixty euros the one night they visit a disco, when they climb onto platforms and gyrate as crazy as they want because they know no one there will ever see them again.

And when they return to Juárez, Marco finds out he's been traded to Pachuca. Down near Mexico City. One of the best teams in the Primera.

Chapter 21

Politics (or, About Those Money-Laundering Allegations)

Crossing into El Paso in my car is an ordeal. It almost always takes a long time. With the summer here, and if I make the mistake of trying to cross at midday, the blacktop bakes so hot my power steering can fail. The worst part of crossing is the way drivers cut me off, constantly. If I leave the slightest space between the car or truck in front of me, someone will dart into it. Maybe they'll throw only a front bumper in there, but that'll be enough to force me to let them in. It's wickedly antisocial. Like, dude, you see me, I see you, we're in this together, and you're still cutting me off? Everyone I've met in Juárez has been so generous and friendly. And every Juarense I encounter in line to El Paso is ruthless. Male or female, young driver or old. Even if the bridge is so backed up it takes hours to inch toward customs, I can't relax for a second. I can't glance at the headlines in
El Diario
or
PM
I won't even change the radio station. I have to be on my guard the entire time.

“No tranza, no avanza,”
Paco Ibarra tells me when I moan about the phenomenon. “It's a saying in Mexico that my dad likes. It's one of his favorite phrases.
No tranza, no avanza
. If you don't cheat, you don't get ahead.”

TOLUCA WINS THE title. As I predicted. Santos comes in second. Mexico does not win the World Cup, though you wouldn't know it from the passion around here for the national team. An opening-round defeat of France inspired hundreds of Juarenses to run laps around the
megabandera
in 113-degree heat. I can't imagine what they'd do if Mexico ever won a game that actually mattered. (Facing Argentina in the first knockout round, Mexico lost 3–1.) Soccer steps off the field. The political season steps forward. An election approaches fast, on July fourth. I watch countless ads about the importance of voting, of the integrity of the process and why everybody should participate. One commercial features an upper-class family finishing up a meal in a restaurant while concluding that every vote makes a difference. In another ad, a family more middle-class decides that voting is good citizenship. Two poor laborers till a field, debating whether their votes matter before agreeing that they do. All these ads really try to sell it, the idea that the public is empowered.

“That's all just so people vote and think they're living in a democracy,” Paco insists. He's been joining his father at private meetings with the candidates for mayor and governor and other offices. “But it's all just a front. It's about giving jobs to functionaries, doling them out like a short-order cook.”

There's no question who will be elected Juárez's next mayor. Teto Murguía already served as mayor, three years ago, for the one term allowed in Mexico. After sitting out the term of current mayor Reyes Ferriz, who himself is now required to leave office, Teto's come back for a second stint in power. His victory is so assured, it didn't look like he was going to bother campaigning. But then one day in May, boom, the city woke up covered in his posters and billboards. Teto's smiling face adorns seemingly every single telephone pole along La Frontera. His banners drape from every bridge. It turns out he owns the strip mall where I lift weights a few nights a week, and that's where he's set up his campaign headquarters. The entire mall has been shrink-wrapped with that same smiling face.

All projections have Teto returning to office in a landslide. “The guy running against him, he's a lightweight,” Mayor Reyes Ferriz tells me. Teto could probably defeat a heavyweight, too. He's a skilled populist. At his rallies in the poorer barrios, Teto hands out free bags of cement, for home repair. In one of the posters his campaign has glued all over the city, Teto squeezes the shoulders of two gray-haired grandmothers, both of whom hold their thumbs high. He's a shoo-in. One pollster has spotted him a twenty-six-point lead.

Yet there's this:

“It's going to be a disaster for the city if Teto is elected,” Reyes Ferriz tells me. When I remind the mayor that he and Teto share a political party, Reyes Ferriz says it doesn't matter. Teto back in office would “send exactly the wrong message.”

The Mexico City newspaper
Excelsior
, citing a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration document, has alleged that Teto's successful first campaign for mayor was funded by La Línea. During his original term, seven companies that formed only days before Teto took office ended up winning a full third of the city's business, according to an article published in
El Diario
. A man named Saulo Reyes Gamboa was a partner in three of those instant—and instantly successful—companies. Reyes Gamboa was already the owner of a chain of hamburger restaurants, a chain of Japanese restaurants, and a chain of Subway sandwich shops. Teto was so close to Reyes Gamboa he named him his chief of police. Three months after Teto's term expired, DEA agents caught Reyes Gamboa trying to transport more than a ton of marijuana into Texas. Teto expressed complete surprise that this man he had trusted and had worked with so closely turned out to be a major drug trafficker. He insists that this in no way means he, Teto, is connected to the drug trade.

There's no doubt Teto has made out quite well for himself, especially for a civil servant. They say in Mexico that a politician who is poor is a poor politician. Teto is such a good politician he owns homes in (at least) Juárez, El Paso, Mexico City, and the vacation town of Ruidoso. He claims that his wealth comes not from politics but largely from side businesses, like a family paint company. His brother heads Juárez's chamber of commerce, and his cousin owns Barrigas, a restaurant chain. When I pulled public records in Texas, I learned Teto holds an ownership stake in a pharmacy concern of some kind. He's obviously well-off. I learned just how well-off he is on that road trip with Francisco Ibarra.

At first it was only supposed to have been a day trip, to the apple town of Cuauhtémoc and right back. But Francisco is known for impulsive decisions, and we ended up staying the night in Chihuahua city, Francisco covering my hotel room and paying for my food, too. The next morning, instead of returning to Juárez as planned, he wanted to fly down to Guadalajara. His family owns several homes on the Pacific coast. Francisco suggested a trip of five days to a week—we'll bring Paco, we'll hit the beach and live large. That is an outing I would take anytime, except when I'm in the real world. I had obligations back in Juárez I absolutely could not break or reschedule. And besides, I couldn't afford to fly to Guadalajara anyway.

“Don't worry about it,” Francisco said, campaigning for the trip. “We'll take Teto's jet.”

I didn't go to Guadalajara. I returned to Juárez instead, as I needed to do. Francisco stayed in Chihuahua for at least another day, and may have continued on to the beach after that. Two questions stuck in my brain on the long bummer of a ride back to the border:

(1) The mayor has a private jet?

(2) He lets Francisco just use it?

PACO IBARRA HAS told me his family was not rich back when he was a kid. They weren't poor, but they hovered no higher than the Mexican middle class. But by his teens, his family grew so wealthy, so suddenly, that a high school friend was taken aback the first time he visited the family's private, ten-mansion compound. Sculptures pranced on the lawns, as they still do. A bridge arched over the pool in the backyard of the house where Paco lived with his parents. Indoors, a waterfall gently cascaded from the second-floor bedrooms down to a grand foyer tiled in marble.

“C'mon, Paco,” the classmate said, “you have to admit you guys are loaded.” And Paco did. He admitted it. It was true.

The great expansion of the Ibarra family fortune coincided with the first Teto Murguía administration. Grupo Yvasa, a company that had started out with a lone taco stand, won a contract to build an entire highway. Yvasa also won contracts to fabricate hundreds of houses on land provided by the city. Some sixty public works projects doled out by Teto were divided between only four companies, Yvasa among the lucky few. The Ibarras remain grateful, and close. How close? Teto sat next to Francisco at the Chivas game. Mario Boisselier, the Indios' attorney, is Teto's campaign manager.

Not six months before I moved to Juárez, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released the results of a wide-ranging investigation into Mexican drug cartels. Project Reckoning, they called it. Among many other findings, the DEA indicated that soccer teams in Mexico's second and third divisions may be laundering cartel drug profits. Several teams were identified by name. The agency also fingered one team in the Primera: Los Indios de Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Ibarra's social project was tied to agents of La Línea, the Juárez Cartel.

“They mention that the Indios were victims of ‘agents' that are linked to the cartel,” Francisco responded. “I don't know if there are agents that are linked, but we are not dealing with agents. We deal with the players directly.”

I wasn't aware of the DEA report when I moved to Mexico, just like I wasn't aware of the murder of Pedro Picasso. I had no idea, basically, what I was getting myself into. Ibarra, when he responded to the allegations, added that an examination of possible wrongdoing in Mexican soccer is a good thing, and will leave the game in a healthier state. To my face he said pretty much the same thing, about a year after the initial report, when I finally got up to speed. He doesn't know what the DEA is talking about. Which makes him pretty much the only one who doesn't.

“You have to remember that Chihuahua is a narco state,” Channel 44 news director Edgar Roman told me one evening when I went body hunting with one of his station's cameramen. “The government and the cartels are one in this city. Picture a triangle. The drug dealers give the money to the government, and the government gives the money back to the people.”

I
have
noticed how the government subsidizes much of Juárez's aboveboard business life. I admire and generally trust
El Diario
, yet how independent can the newspaper ultimately be when it floats on page after page of ads from the federal government and the state government and the city government, every day, just like every other paper in town? All those government-sponsored “Please Vote” commercials that have annoyed me since February have certainly padded the bottom line at Channel 44. I shared a beer at a party one night with a guy who told me he was an actor. The next day, at halftime of a Primera match I was watching on TV, the guy showed up in a commercial for the Todos Somos Juárez social program, his acting underwritten by Felipe Calderón.

None of that qualifies as money laundering in the traditional sense. It's more common, I've since learned, for money to be laundered through chain restaurants, or, even better, through pharmacies, fronts that can cloak the purchase of processing chemicals. I've read in a dozen places by now that drug money, if it's not the backbone of the Mexican economy, is at least one of three legs—along with oil and tourism—that keep the country upright. The profits from drug sales touch everything in Juárez, and everyone. (And of course everything and everyone in El Paso, too. As Tony Payan, a professor at both UTEP and UACJ told me, those Juárez drugs don't end up in Chicago without crossing through El Paso first.) Even someone as naive as me can figure that out. A person who wants to survive in this city—and, God forbid, if they want to actually thrive—will mingle with the drug underworld somehow, in some way, wittingly or unwittingly. If the news director at Channel 44 knows Chihuahua is a narco state, then the lucky contractors paid millions of dollars by the state know full well where their money is coming from. They'd have to be totally stupid
not
to know.

And that, incredibly, turns out to be Francisco Ibarra's best defense. I don't like even calling it a defense, because that implies that Francisco is up to something nefarious, which not even the DEA has substantiated with hard data. Francisco doesn't run the Grupo Yvasa construction business. He has brothers who run it, with their powerful father supervising everything. Francisco is the son in the family who likes soccer, likes it so much he worked with the team called Cobras instead of concentrating on construction, as his father wanted. Francisco likes radio, too, enough to build a popular AM station. Radio, really, is his career these days. The Indios are his toy. He bought the minor league team that became the Indios because the millions of dollars he needed to buy them had come his way, somehow.

“Francisco Ibarra is a good man,” says the doctor who prescribed me Xanax. “
Muy sincero
. Decent.”

Francisco sure isn't stupid. I've used that word as a crude shorthand.
Ignorant
is a better adjective.
Willfully ignorant
. Kind of
exactly
the same way Marco Vidal remains stubbornly clueless about the violence surrounding him in Juárez. The violence that killed one of his club's coaches. That inspired his wife and her family to flee the country for a while. He doesn't think terribly hard about why his dream house came on the market at such an affordable price. He stays in his soccer bubble. Ask Marco about drug running or money laundering or cartel hierarchies and you might think he's an airhead, or a child.
What? Huh?
The less he knows the better. Marco's smart enough—and he's very smart, super sharp—to be as dumb as possible.

Just like Francisco. Agents of La Línea? I don't know anything about La Línea. Or about cartels. Agents? Like sports agents?

“My dad is the most honest person I've ever met,” Paco told me when I asked him about the laundering allegations. “I'd bet my life on it. If it ever turned out he wasn't honest, my world would be turned upside down.”